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Posted

Timebubbles have been beaten to death on the forum, but I haven't seen any mathematical discussions on just how much energy is being tossed around. So, since I was bored, I ran some numbers.

 

I can't remember the specific point where this number is given, and I can't find the passage, but at some point in AoL, I think Wayne states he fights people somewhere around 8x speed. Using this as a base, I figured out how much energy a bullet would lose upon exiting an 8x speed bubble. I used a .45 ACP round as a base for my data, because I figured that was acceptably close to a revolver round (and it's also the first thing I found lol).

 

A .45 ACP round weighing 15g and traveling 255 m/s has 483 Joules of energy. Multiplied by the compression ratio of the bubble (8x) this becomes 3.9 kJ. Upon exiting the speed bubble, the bullet returns to its "normal" speed, and the change in energy that represents is 3.42 kJ. This 3.42 kJ of energy isn't described as being dissipated as heat or sound, and so presumably, it skips away to the Spirit realm or wherever.

 

This is a lot of energy to just go nowhere. To give some reference, you could run 2 good sized space heaters for 1 second on that. That is the same energy that 3.5 square meters of earth receives from solar radiation, and that's enough energy to heat 1 kg of water nearly a degree Celsius (ok, that doesn't sound like much, but that IS a lot of water, that's a liter of water). This extra energy scales linearly with the compression ratio of the speed bubble. So an actual equation for energy lost to the magical aether would look something like this:

 

dE=(Compression Ratio - 1)(Kinetic Energy of Object Inside Speed Bubble)

 

While we're on the topic of compression ratios, Wayne has a LOT more range with his compression than I gave him credit for before I started this analysis. I used the scene where Tillaume tries to blow them all up as a basis for his maximum compressing abilities.

 

The amount of time that passes in the speed bubble Wayne creates is approximated by the time it took me to read the passage to myself, minus a few seconds to account for words that aren't expressly dialog. This came out to be 12 seconds. Tillaume is described as "across the room" and the room is fairly large, so I used 6 meters as the distance between Wayne and the bomb. Regarding the bomb, the explosion has already formed by the time the speed bubble goes up and is just barely starting. This simplifies my assumptions a little. The explosion has to travel the full 6 meters between itself and Wayne, and since it's already formed, I can assume its expansion to be at a constant speed. The speed can be approximated by the fact that they don't describe the explosion as having a shock wave. This means the explosion is sub-sonic (if just barely) and so I used 340 m/s for the speed of the explosion.

 

Now for figuring out the compression ratio of the speed bubble.

Observed Velocity of Explosion = (Distance between Wayne and bomb)/(time of conversation in speed bubble) = (6m)/(12 sec) = 0.5 m/s

Time Compression = (Actual Velocity of Explosion)/(Observed Velocity of Explosion) = (340 m/s)/(0.5 m/s) = 680 times compression

 

Holy shards in the sky, Batman! That is a crap-ton of time compression. Way, way more than what I initially assumed from just reading the book. Anyways, this post isn't about proving anything, it was just curiosity that led me to figure out these relative numbers. They're not meant as hard and fast rules for what is actually going on, as I doubt that Brandon is consulting a table of energy values  when writing his books, but I thought it was kind of fun to have it presented like this.  

Posted

Well, if you think about it there would definitely need to be more than 8X compression possible. Wax and Wayne have a whole conversation inside a bubble, where the people outside barely seem to be moving, and they cover up the conversation with a cough. If you have ever sped up a DVD to 8X speed, that doesn't seem nearly sufficient to cover conversations like that.

Posted

Nah, too much math up in here. I won't try to consume it into my own mondo-threads. ;)

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